


only love can dig you out of this

by Emily Waters (missparker)



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: 5 Things, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-19
Updated: 2018-02-19
Packaged: 2019-03-21 09:00:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13737516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missparker/pseuds/Emily%20Waters
Summary: Five times they were accidentally a little bit more in love than they planned.





	only love can dig you out of this

**Author's Note:**

> do you ever see an on fire dumpster and then instead of walking away, for some reason you climb into it? yeah, me too. don't @ me.

_Act like you’ve been here before_  
_Smile less and dress up some more_  
_Tie up your scarf real tight_  
_These boys are out for blood tonight_

**Slow It Down - The Lumineers**

*

**i.**

The first time they see each other after the show, they’re both in LA for work stuff. They make plans like it’s no big deal, texting each other their schedules and carefully excavating the time they’re both free, because free time is precious and rare. Sweeping away dirt from a bone. 

They discuss meeting at World of Wonder, at a neutral location like a coffee shop, or a cliche like the beach. They still haven’t actually talked on the phone.

Finally, Katya texts that Trixie should just come to his hotel room and they’ll figure it out from there. He has Katya in his phone as _Katya Zamo_ and the picture is something he saved from the internet of Katya at a show. Sweaty in a blonde wig with red lips, doing the splits. It’s hard to make out when he’s just looking at the small circle that goes along with the contact information, but he knows that’s what it is and his brain fills in the gaps that his eyes can’t bridge.

Should he call Katya Brian? No, that’d be weird. Right? It’d be weird even if they didn’t have the same name. 

Katya’s in a different hotel than he is and it’s about a mile away. In New York, he’d walk. In LA, he has the desk downstairs get him a cab. The cab driver seems irritated at the short distance, but Trixie ignores his annoyed huffing and stares down at his phone. Pays the guy in cash and doesn’t look back when he hops out. 

He gets butterflies on the elevator ride up even though it’s not a date. His nerves do stem from compatibility, however. They had clicked so immediately on the show, can text like they’ve known each other their whole lives, but what if all of that doesn’t translate to the real world? Katya made him feel like he was the only thing in his universe sometimes but that’s just Katya. He can make anyone feel that way. 

He doesn’t knock on the door right away; he needs just, like, a minute to compose himself, but he’s only been standing there ten seconds maybe when the door opens and Katya has a flash of surprise on his face and then starts to scream and flail. Trixie feels himself get yanked into the room by his t-shirt. His backpack is added weight and it causes him to stumble right into Katya’s arms. 

He smells like cigarettes and minty gum and he can feel the scrape of stubble as this excited fumble becomes a proper hug. Katya tucks his chin into the space between Trixie’s shoulder and neck. Trixie is the one that steps back first and says, “I didn’t even knock, how did you know I was here?”

“I didn’t, I’ve just been opening the door every two minutes because I was excited,” Katya says and it seems so genuine and so warm that Trixie laughs, a delighted scream and hugs him again.

“Look at us, mama, on the outside,” Katya says. “Free in the world.” 

His grin is still wide and white and Trixie finds himself grinning helplessly back at it. 

They spend something like ten hours together that day. Trixie has to go back to World of Wonder to film something after lunch and Katya just comes along and watches and then they go to dinner and then they go see a local show out of drag and Trixie thinks if Katya didn’t have an early flight, they might have stayed together the whole night, too, talking and scream laughing. 

When Trixie thinks back, that’s the day in his mind that they started being Trixie & Katya, almost like a single entity, a set, a thing that felt wildly incomplete when seperated. 

Which means for a lot of his time, he feels the hollow echo of missing Katya, like a pebble rattling around in an empty can. 

 

**ii.**

If he wasn’t on tour, he’d fly out to Boston and help Katya move west. He thinks that would be lovely, actually, fun even if it was also a lot of sweatily lifting boxes full of plastic hands and fake blood and ratty blonde wigs. He’d do it, totally, without even having to be asked.

Katya doesn’t ask, because Katya knows that he’s going to be only halfway through a tour and when the weekend rolls around that Katya actually leaves Boston for LA, Trixie is in Colorado. 

Katya sends snaps to his phone of the movers and of an empty room of his place save for the camera spinning quickly to show boy Katya waving a tiny plastic hand perched on his index finger. 

“It’s happening,” Trixie says, replaying the snap for Kim on the bus. “It’s finally happening.”

“Yeah?” Kim asks. “When’s the wedding?”

Trixie rolls his eyes, calls Kim a stupid whore, but it does feel a little like Katya is coming to LA specifically for him. Katya is coming to LA because he works way more in LA than in Boston these days and cross country flights are fun for no one, especially smokers. And it makes sense for them to be in the same city for the youtube show. Katya’s flight delay last time had set back filming and cost them money and they’d both received a tense administrative memo from WOW about it not happening again. 

Trixie daydreams about coming home to Katya every night before snapping out of it and remembering Katya is moving to the same city, not his dumb little overpriced apartment. Anyway, Katya needs to live alone, probably. He keeps strange hours, has strange hobbies, lives mostly in a disgusting sty of his own filth. Trixie’s closet is color-coordinated, as much as you can coordinate pink and black. He likes his condiments in the refrigerator alphabetically. He needs quiet, womb like conditions when he writes songs. 

They’d found a pretty decent apartment for Katya. Katya would send Trixie listings and if Trixie was home on a Sunday, he’d spend the whole day scouting them out. The one Katya ended up with had been a bit of a battle - there were always lots of applications for rentals, and the apartment was priced well because the building predated Jesus, but Katya had won because he was a single occupant, not a couple, and the landlord liked the fact that he traveled so much and would never be home. 

Trixie had thought that was a little weird, but it was exactly the kind of weird Katya had liked. 

“Maybe he’ll murder me!” he’d said excitedly. 

By the time Trixie gets home to LA, Katya has been in the apartment two and a half weeks and is already gone, doing three gigs over the weekend on the east coast - two in New York and one in Jersey. But Trixie finds an envelope in his PO Box and it’s from Katya. He can tell the minute he opens it because the inside smells like him.

Inside is a note written on the back of a CVS receipt that says, _Be a dear and feed my plants, Tracy_. The other thing inside the envelope is a key. 

Trixie has something like three days where he’ll be home and then he has to go do two shows in San Francisco, but then he gets to be home for ten days. This is his first over 24 hours at home in ages, but he still takes a shower and then goes straight to Katya’s. 

It’s mostly boxes. The second bedroom is filled with all Katya’s drag in varying degrees of unpacked. Mostly open boxes that had been rifled through. The whole room smells like sweat and cigarettes. It’s disgusting and it makes Trixie’s eyes prick with tears. 

He’s so fucking stupid. He shouldn’t have come here. 

He stands in the bright kitchen, drenched in late morning sun, and puts the key on his keyring. Looks out the window that looks down on the little courtyard. 

He can’t bring a bottle of champagne but he did pick up a tin of folgers (because if something is complete garbage, chances are Katya wants to put it into his body) so he leaves it on the counter so that Katya has something to come home to. Then he finds a bit of scratch paper and a pen and draws a picture of a little plant, and leaves that on top of the coffee tin. 

It feels cheesy, though, juvenile. So he draws a dick peeing onto the plant.

Better.

Katya calls him at four in the morning on what is now technically a Tuesday and says very seriously, “Tracy please come over and piss on my plants again.”

“I’m in San Francisco,” he says, his face mostly pushed into his pillow. He’d only answered because he’d given Katya a specific ringtone and had recognized the sound.

“Come home,” Katya says.

“I’ll be home Wednesday,” he says.

“Ok-ayyy,” Katya says in a sing-song. “But that’s a long time to hold all your pee for me.”

Trixie hangs up.

Smiles into his pillow.

 

**iii.**

Katya doesn’t drink anymore, or do drugs, but will sometimes smoke pot. Trixie doesn’t like pot very much because it tends to give him a migraine every one out of five times he smokes it and those odds just aren’t good enough. 

But Katya takes him out to dinner to celebrate finishing season one of their weirdly popular youtube show and the fact that he’s about to go do All Stars 2 and when they get back to Katya’s place (that’s become downright homey, Trixie has to admit), Katya feeds him little nibbles of a brownie slowly and it’s a totally different kind of high. He eats too much because he likes the feeling of Katya’s fingers against his lips, just inside his mouth slightly, and doesn’t tell him when to stop. 

Katya is calmer that Trixie has ever seen him, maybe. Though maybe he’s the sluggish one. His eyes feel funny, the air around him feels heavy like honey on his skin. 

“Oh honey,” he whispers and cracks himself up. Katya laughs with him even though he doesn’t know why. He screams and then says, “Hooooooneeeeeeeey.”

And then is laughing so hard he can’t catch his breath, pitching forward. They’ve been sitting on the couch with crossed legs, facing one another, so when he falls forward, he falls right into Katya’s arms. 

“You’re so stupid,” Katya wheezes, wrapping his arms around Trixie, hanging on tight. 

When Trixie catches his breath, finally, he realizes that he’s wiggled into the embrace, that he’s nuzzled into Katya and that Katya is rubbing soft circles on his back. 

“You stoned?” Katya says. 

“Mmm,” is all Trixie can manage. He feels like his bones have gone soft. 

“Let’s go to bed,” Katya says. Katya hefts him up, carries more than his fair share of Trixie’s weight. Trixie is happy to follow him into the messy bedroom. The sheets won’t be clean and the bed isn’t made, though there is a tangled blanket that Katya pulls back for him. Trixie pushes his shorts down, strips off the tank top and crawls into the bed in just his boxers.

This isn’t a migraine time, this is a floaty happy time. Katya curls up against him, and they lie skin to skin for what feels like hours. Half the night. But even as Trixie drifts in and out of sleep, he can tell that Katya stays awake.

Finally he says into the darkness, “Brian?”

Trixie grunts to show he’s listening.

“I slipped up. Last week.” 

Trixie is sobering up now, maybe, but still feels sluggish and has to process the words for a few moments. Until he remembers what slipping up for Katya means. 

“Oh,” he says, rolling over to face him. Katya’s got tears in his eyes and he looks ashamed and broken and scared. “Oh,” Trixie says, reaching out to hold him like Katya had held him earlier on the couch. Small circles on his sharp shoulder blades; Katya’s stubble against his collarbone. “Hey. Brian, I love you. I _love_ you. It’s gonna be okay.” 

Trixie feels fingernails digging into his skin and Katya makes a sound, a sob, that Trixie will never, ever forget. A haunting, damaged sound. Trixie just whispers to him until he cries himself out and falls asleep.

I love you, I love you, I love you. 

Because what the fuck else can he say?

 

**iv.**

Like, he knows they’re in love. He’s not fucking stupid. He knows how desperately deep his feelings for Katya go; he can see the way Katya looks at him sometimes. Like not only did he hang the dumb moon, but he invented the entire sky. 

But it doesn’t change the fact that Trixie likes monogamy and romance and commitment and Katya doesn’t, so they mutually and silently just kind of decide to be in love with each other. They have the show and the friendship and the little life they’ve carved out for each other and it’s really fulfilling in a lot of ways which is more than a lot of couples get, he thinks.

And yes, Katya does check in from time to time asking him for a kiss. On the show or on a stage or sometimes when they’re alone. Katya will occasionally try to sleep with him but doesn’t get hurt when Trixie turns him down because while Katya lets a lot of things besides his brain drive his life, he’s not stupid. He knows what they’re doing.

And it’s fine and enough until one day it isn’t. Until it starts to wear them both a little too thin. Trixie breaks up with another boyfriend or the boyfriend, really, breaks up with him. Tells him the only way that it’s going to work is if Trixie lives in one place and that’s not the life Trixie has so it’s as good as getting dumped even though Trixie is the one that has to pull the trigger because the guy is, as it turns out, a shitty coward. 

They have like, two more episodes of the youtube show to film before they make the jump to cable. It never mattered if the youtube show failed, but this new thing involves contracts and lawyers and like, so much pressure not to fail. And Trixie is one hundred percent worried about failing, because it’s not just them shooting the shit in front of the camera. They have to go to things called _concept_ meetings and the episodes have structure and segments and time limits and they won’t have two seasons of inside jokes to fall back on because they’re going to have a different audience. Or a wider one anyway, if everything goes to plan.

Anyway, Trixie feels a little shitty because he’s single again, and their safe little show is ending, and he’s like deeply exhausted and he hasn’t seen Katya in weeks. 

Trixie gets to set first, starts getting ready because it takes him longer. He doesn’t have a naturally beautiful bone structure to fall back on and Katya’s pads are like one disgusting bra and a single hip pad each. Trixie is half padding these days.

He’s got everything laid out and glue in his eyebrows when Katya comes into the dressing room holding his one single duffel bag, the asshole. He smells like cigarette smoke and looks a little manic and Trixie worries briefly that he’s high because that’s a real thing that happens sometimes. More at gigs than the show, but sometimes at the show. It’s been a hard year. They both deal with this situation differently. 

But today, Katya decides to deal with it by pulling Trixie to his feet, pushing him up against the door, and kissing him. 

It all happens so fast, which is a cliche but it’s true because it’s like a blur of seeing Katya and then a thump and then Katya’s foul ashtray lips pressing against his which should be disgusting, which _is_ disgusting except for he kisses back and maybe it’s Trixie who opens his mouth, who the fuck knows. (It is.) 

They kiss for a long time. Too long. They fly past too long and veer into more troubling territory, like now they’re gonna have to talk about it because there’s no laughing it off as a joke because it’s been full minutes and their tongues are straight up in each other’s mouths. 

Getting into drag with a boner suuuuucks, they both probably should have thought about that, too. Katya’s hands have slipped under Trixie’s shirt and are sliding back down, rough and hot. 

Someone walks by the closed dressing room door and is talking loudly and it makes them break apart. 

Katya looks wild eyed, is red and sweaty and has clenched his hands into fists.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he says. “I want to fucking kill myself.” 

“Um,” Trixie says. “It’s just two more, we can make it through two more, dude.”

“Not that,” Katya says, rubbing his hands over his face roughly. “Don’t do that, you know what I mean.” 

“Please don’t kill yourself,” Trixie says, because he too has said that in jest but when you’re talking to an addict, it becomes real important to figure out right away if they’re serious or not. 

“Okay,” Katya says. 

“We’re gonna get through today and then we can… can sit down and re-evaluate,” Trixie says. 

“What does that even mean?” Katya demands loudly. 

“I don’t know, don’t yell at me, I don’t know!” he says, tears pricking the back of his eyes. Katya doesn’t always realize that it’s hard for him too because it’s Trixie that always says no. Katya doesn’t realize that it’s harder, actually. But the idea of spending a night with Katya and then him sleeping with someone else on the road just makes Trixie want to puke. “It means we figure it out.”

Katya nods, turns around and looks at Trixie in the mirror, like it’s easier somehow. “I’m sorry I kissed you. I just… snapped.”

“It’s okay,” Trixie says. “We can fix it. We can fix this.” 

He sits down at the vanity again, applies another layer of purple glue with shaking hands. 

“I need another cigarette,” Katya says. He takes his drag stuff with him and doesn’t come back. Trixie’s camera ready when she goes to look for him. There are other dressing rooms, he knows, that other talent are half living in. Raja and Raven shoot regularly here, enough that they don’t clear things out. 

Trixie stops when he hears Chris and Ron talking to each other in low, serious voices just behind one of the mostly closed doors.

“I dunno man, maybe we can get some extra footage? Reaction shots? Splice it together?”

“In different looks?” Ron asks. 

“We’ll have them sit down and do B roll separately. If they tank, we can just fake it.”

“They’ll be okay, man,” Ron says. “They’re professional. It’s just two more.”

Great. Even their editors know something is wrong. That they’re struggling. 

He doesn’t see Katya until they sit down to film. Katya smiles big and Trixie relaxes a little and it’s okay, actually. After a few minutes they find their rhythm, because the chemistry is real even if everything else is a mess. 

He says something that makes Katya laugh and he reaches out, wheezing. Trixie catches his hand and squeezes it three times. 

Katya squeezes back.

 

**v.**

Brian is always Brian, even when he has Trixie sitting on top. Trixie is a performance, a layer he can add or remove at will. He can always take her off. 

Katya is… Katya. 

When they sit down to have their talk about what has to change so they’re not miserable all the time, Katya starts to cry only when he explains that sometimes the line between Katya and Brian is so blurry that even he doesn’t know where one starts and the other stops. 

Trixie knows this, of course. Trixie is never in drag unless he’s working or prepping for work. But with Katya, it’s always a wig while vacuuming or nail polish on days off or lipstick just because. 

“You’re gay,” Katya says. “Like _gaaaay_. And when I’m Katya, I’m a real woman.”

“And sometimes you’re Katya, even when you’re not,” Trixie finishes for him. Katya nods, his beautiful eyes watery and rimmed in red. 

It’s not like Trixie doesn’t know about this, but he didn’t know it was a concern that Katya had been carrying around. Doesn’t know how to make him believe that it doesn’t matter because with anyone else, it would. Trixie’s never dated another drag queen before. Well, before Katya. Because isn’t that what they’ve been doing, really? Keys to each other’s apartments, facetiming constantly, always in each other’s hip pocket. 

“I love you,” Trixie says. It’s all he ever has to fall back on anyway. Katya knows what this means. It means Trixie doesn’t know why, either.

“I’m gonna take a break, I think,” Katya says. “A real one. My mom is gonna come out… I might go back to Boston for awhile.” 

Oh, Trixie thinks. So this is what actual, real heartbreak feels like. Good to know that all the other times he’d felt like his heart was broken had been absolute bullshit. 

“Okay,” Trixie says. “If that’s what… can I still talk to you?” He’s already crying, jesus. “Can I see you or do you need a break from me?”

“You can see me,” Katya says, words tumbling over themselves in a big hurry. “I don’t need a break from you, sorry, fuck, just like… work. And strangers and bars and pressure.”

Katya smiles that big smile, but he’s crying too. 

“Let’s go to bed,” Trixie says. 

It’s two in the afternoon; Katya’s apartment is filled with buttery yellow sunlight, spilling in from everywhere. Clothes come off, they climb into the bed. This is always what they do when everything gets to be too much. Skin to skin, holding each other. This time, Trixie tucks Katya against him, holds him tight. 

Katya’s mother does come to collect him and take him home for awhile. Trixie is determined not to overwhelm him if he needs space, but Katya texts him every day, calls him a few times a week and while it’s not as good as being together in the flesh, it helps. 

Katya mostly does yoga and works on staying sober. After just a month, when they facetime, Trixie can see that Katya looks better. His skin looks better, his coloring too. That hollowed out look seems to be fading. 

Or maybe Trixie is just taking it on for him, but he’ll do so gladly. Whatever Katya needs, right? Isn’t that love?

“Hey,” Katya says over facetime. Trixie is in a hotel room in Florida, he thinks. He looks out the window and reassures himself. Florida. “Mom wants to tell you something.”

The picture blurs as he hands the phone over to his mom.

“Hi Pat,” Trixie says.

“Hi Brian, honey,” she says in her thick Boston accent. “I just wanted to tell you that you’re embarrassing yourself on All Stars.”

Trixie screams. 

“You gotta do better, you’re bringing shame to our family,” she says and then laughs. “I love ya, honey.”

“Jeeze, thanks for the support mom,” he says. 

Katya takes the phone back. “She’s such a bitch!”

“She’s right, I’m an embarrassment,” Trixie says, still laughing. 

“Hey, I’d fuck ya even if you were the first to go,” he says. “Love you, call you later you rotted cunt.”

He ends the call. 

“Love you, too,” Trixie says into the empty hotel room. 

He lies back on the bed, daydreams about that day in Katya’s bed in the warm sunlight. Pretends Katya is there with him until it’s time to get ready to go to the show.


End file.
